Writing Tomorrow

Monday, September 11, 2017

The waterlilies spun out in incandescent pink. In the middle
of the water, was a tree, grown by the gift of winds and winged seeds.
Somewhere, bees buzzed, tiny, brown, ephemeral. The honey from Neem trees was
mildly tinged with bitterness, too subtle for the ordinary palate, which
preferred the adulteration by cane sugar, the honey clotting at the dregs.
People came from all over the state to buy sarees, gold, and to eat in restaurants. No one knew the
price of things, they just paid whatever was asked.

When it got too hot in that seaside town they pushed off to
the hills, faster than the traffic could carry them, taking lesser known
routes, past exquisite churches all dressed up like white icing cakes. There
was only the semblance of normalcy, for hunger ruled the land. The world was
diminished by war, and more so by fear, for even where there was no disaster,
people feared for their lives. Every morning was spent reading newspapers where
obituaries ruled the moment. The stories of past lives were more interesting
than the stories of every day rapes and death. Obituaries told the story of
people who lived normal lives, where there was no terrible occurrence of
violence. These were people one probably knew, who lived in the next village,
or a nearby town. Marriages and deaths had a statistical regularity to them,
for people lived in anticipation of one, and fear of the other. Young people
found one another through the investigations of their elders. Beauty was not a
criterion, it was whether one could cook or take care of old people that
decided the day for theshy bride. It
was the old world, caught between the eyelids.

Stella turned around in the wheel chair. It was another red
hued day, with lightening flashes coming through the cardboard sky. The cracks which
had formed were simply frightening, the thunder seemed ever louder. She knew
that she would be here when the sky rent open, and they were vaulted into an
open realm of stars, sun and nowhere to go. She shut her eyes and returned to
the safe world of the past, which was indecipherable to those who had not lived
in that familiar world. The past, so irredeemable, so ever present, so filled
with latent desires before aluminium took over the world, and iron was
constantly distilled for newer varieties of steel. No plants could grow in such
an environment, and the desert approached ever closer, as did the captive
hills, pushed by the energy of it’s galactic past to crush the present in its imminent lava flows and gravitational pull to
the surface. The sky always red and dusty, was shut out by the blue painted
canvas, which mimicked the skies in digital reconstructions of how the sky
should be, with its fleeting clouds which when counted, could tell that time
was passing, for the wind blew them here and there. The artist knew how to
manoevre the clouds, create shapes, filter light. It was like being eternally
in a planetarium, where the cloth sky absorbed the infinite beauty of the
night, and when the lights came on, why, we were back in the auditorium of our very
own earth.

The waters spilled around the outskirts of our city. They
had become dank and very dreary. Every year, men and women in masks went out,
and cleared the sewage with machines that droned for atleast a week. The water
was distilled in larger tanks, and piped out. We never knew if there would be
enough retrieved to last us for a year. But magically, the machines pumped out
that clear fluid so essential for us even though we were now in the last phase
of survival before leaving planet earth. How many of us would leave, no one
knew.

Stella thought of the time when she had first come to the
city, full of hope. The earth had crashed around them, and each of them
believed that death was better than living in the ruins of what was once their
great city. Yet, day by day, they found that the will to live was greater than
their sorrow. They had picked themselves up from the rubble, and moved toward
what the politicians said were their new homes, prefabricated aluminium sheds
which had been put up overnight. Here, there was no sound other than that of
people weeping, reciting litanies of their lost loves, and then the sudden
sterotorus sound of someone breathing heavily in their sodden sleep.

Where was Anjali? The girl had become lazy, and was never to
be found. The wheel chair had a back, hard and resolute, which jabbed her
spine. So, she sat a little away from it, leaning forward. The loneliness of
being old was not the problem, that she had managed several decades ago. The
music that played in her ears constantly from the little box in her pocket was
the best invention of the previous century. Time was ephemeral, it fleeted past. But the seconds pounded in
her ears, as she thought about space travel, which the morning circulars had
stated to be the next step in their sojourn on planet earth. They would have to
leave soon. The question was who would be chosen, and who left out?

Stella asked this question of Anjali very often, who would
desultorily turn her head away, not getting involved in the very real fear that
Stella always communicated. How did it matter to her, whether the old woman
went to Mars or not? Such a stupid question! She noticed as she looked out of
the sparkling glass windows that the Administrators had simulated rain again.
Clearly the sparkling bejeweled window glass was a gift from the lewd microbe
replete troughs running outside the metro.The used condoms, the disgusting trophies of late night copulation and
the indestructible plastic that was thrown by young mothers who had not found a
way to potty train their children had been digested by the incinerators.The water returned to them, clean, flawless,
with a lucidity that was no longer grey and worn out, but fresh, smelling of
lavender. Everything was ofcourse chemically produced, but the effect was the
same as if it was natural. As for drinking water, they had stopped accessing it
from taps, or asking for it. It came to them piped every day, just as the food
did.

Stella thought again of the days in Paris, when she had lost
her memory, and was frightened that the State would notice. She had become
frail, wind wafted, perfumed, bejeweled, not knowing where she was going, or
how she would return. The days had been listless, watching the skies turn their
incredible colours, as if congealed in the palette of the sky. She would lower
the blinds, sleep till late in the morning, and then start again to wander the
streets that her feet knew so well, she did not need memory, names, landscape,
maps. Twenty years later, in another continent, with the tarpaulin sheds
painted over the crumbling surface they knew to be ruined buildings of another
century, long gone, she realized that life was only breath, breathing.

It was as if memory was a shard, sharp and double ended. At
one level, she responded to the impulse to remember, and in remembering, live
again in an opulence of a world which once she had known so well. The earth was
tender and brought to her more gifts than she could have wanted. It gave her
fruit and flowers, and the gentle gaze of animals, almost doe like in their
captivity. Here, too, had been their protected canvas of the familiar, no one
stepping out of their bourgeoisie tableaus. When the earth had rent apart,
first by war, and then by convulsions unbeknown to them, they had realized that
they were human, subject to geological change, galactic time. The newspapers
reported the finding of new universe of stars and planets. With that, hearts calmed down, they returned
to the chores so familiar to them, waiting for the seasons to change, and the
fruits and flowers that beckoned them from the gaily blazoning shops with their
lights and perfumes. They were happy to have more days at hand, and then when
the darkness fell on them, their own sense of belonging was quite gone.
Everything that was theirs, fell to another. In a commonality of loss, the
powers that be became profoundly tyrannical, creating an artifice of light,
sound, life. And things began to move again, simply at first, but with a
growing complexity as the years went by. Fear was camaflouged, and civility
reigned again.

Stella had chosen to leave Paris when the first tarpaulins
came up above the great cities, and the sky had become punctured by air craft
which had to leave from outside the known radius of the world as people knew
it. They had to choose their destination, tunnel to airports which like
filigree jewellery appeared outside the metropolis. And then in a matter of
days, they would have assimilated in another part of the globe, a little
frightened, but somehow sure that they had done the right thing, yes, moved
towards their own survival.

If she had chosen New Delhi as the site of transitioning to outer space it was because she had been
familiar with it in her youth. The intellectual world of writers always served
to protect the narcissus, and she had thought she would walk through familiar
streets in the new world, where the sign boards had changed, and the old became
abused by neglect. She had no fear in the beginning, since her memories of her
work world were somehow quite intact. And people had taken to her immediately,
providing her with facilities and home, papers and Internet. She had served
them well once, and the records of her brilliance were sufficient for the new
municipalities, charged with electronic devices, not to repel her, or exclude
her. Or so she thought,but then her
foreignness was so palpable, her accent so pronounced, that she fell out of the
web of belonging again, retreating into silence. The young girl she had adopted
was the only one she now could turn to, but over the years, the sense of
familiarity had reduced them to non presence, each busy with their thoughts,
living life by the day.

How completely hopeful the girl had been when she had come
to the house, and offered her services, in exchange for learning new languages,
and the scientific aura which surrounded the old woman who expressed her innate
ability to keep up with the alarming technological changes that most people
found difficult to handle. Yet, unfortunately, the problem of memory had
surfaced as the greatest deficit, and both Stella and Anjali started to feel
they were sliding into a place of great danger. Stella managed to keep
composed, putting her blue eyeshadow every morning on her heavy lids with a
trembling hand. She felt that if she could communicate that dressing up was
important, then the girl would make greater effort to dispense with the
casualness of her own attire. Anjali was often dressed in crumpled pyjamas and
her blouses though clean, were never distinguishable. She had none of the
sophistication of the women Stella had been associated with, the pallor of her
face showed that she had never had food which was nutritious. She was born in
the days of piped food, and if she survived at all, it would be due to her will
power and that of her boyfriend, who stayed listlessly with them, always poring
over his work without looking up, or out at the cardboard sky. He had over the
years, grown a little dense, his short frame picking up the carbohydrates in
the food with ease, as he never stirred from his chair. However, the couple
were happy, smiling at each other peacefully over their many chores. The
government was now keen that people should inhabit the houses they stayed in as
if indeed they were in outer space. The simulation of the circumstances of
floating in a vacuum were being increasingly made available. For Stella, who
was from an older generation, the act of looking out of the window was still
replete with images she was comfortable with, familiar with. For Anjali and Ashter
the inner spaces of their minds, without the vinyl of reproduced images was
quite enough.

Stella could hear the drone of their conversations,
sometimes there was muted laughing. They were always aware of her presence, and
sometimes they would appear, looking innocent and yet guarded. Had she called,
did she need something. Then, when she shook her head, a veiled look of relief
crossed their faces, and they disappeared again, into that world of which she
knew nothing.

The warmth of their personas was sufficient for her, they
were alive, they were human, they lived in the adjacent room, making the house
accessible to her wheel chair by their quick inventions, all plastic, but
unimaginably brilliant. It had been a long time since she actually got out of it,
her limbs had atrophied, but in a second, they were able to roll her out
painlessly on to her bed every evening, and slide her into the chair in the
morning. She had stopped thanking them, for they shrugged their shoulders
placatingly, placing an affectionate hand on her shoulder when she did.

The world was not spinning anymore, gravity was congealed in
the last echo of the wall that separated them from the universe. It was not
clear when they had lost their axis, but just as they never enquired, so too,
they never doubted. The radio told them that they were lost people, and that
the will to survive must be their own. They listened, placating one another, as
the days shredded into countless anonymity, each moment going unrecorded except
for the cries of the cicadas, which had survived the catastrophe. It was not
cockroaches that had survived, for they got eaten up during the last days of
the war, when all else had been cooked.

Stella shuddered. She called out again for Angel and her
companion. They seemed to be rising, she could hear the house come awake, with
it’s several sounds. There was the beep of the alarm clock, the radio playing
music, the buzzing of their conversation. She could hear the water being filled
carefully, half a bucket each of lavender fragrant distilled water. Yes, she
knew the sound so well, that she was comforted. She heard these every day. They
would come soon, she knew that. She waited. The old world, the memories drew
her back.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

There are several ways in which we know that a new
evolutionary step in the recorded and fossilized histories of the planet,is on the way. Sometimes, when the earth
seems more prone to disaster, we watch horrified as cities crumble into running
water, when earthquakes and wars coincide, when bombing destroys beautiful
terrains, and leaves them looking like deserts, without people or oases.
Theologically, and experientially speaking, people during these moments wait
for the world to end. The mortuary rites of people dead in large numbers,
during disasters, are often quite different from the ones that such victims
would have had, if they had died in due course, of old age or lingering
illnesses. The idea of“mass deaths”
then, is represented through the morgues, the recognition of amputated body
parts, the state funeral in the case of heroes, or the recital of sacred verses
for the lost body at sea.

The statistics of
suicide also go up, during this time, as people who feel they cannot withstand
the pressure of the times, lose their life by irrevocable individual choice.
The crushing of the peasantry in the 19th century in Europe, was
reflected in the large number of suicides that occurred in every country.Based on these statistics, Emile Durkheim
provided a typology of four basic kinds of suicides, since the subject matter
of Sociology had to be foregrounded as a discipline.By reading the Suicide rates, he understood
thatfirstly, individuals could take
their life if they were too integrated in the society, and felt that theirvery lives were being demanded of them, by
Society, resulting in altruistic suicide. Cultic suicides belonged to this set,
as did heroism in the battlefield. Then there were egoistic suicides, where
individuals did not feel integrated in the norms of the society, felt
alienated, and sometimes, (as with intellectuals) saw themselves as being
different from their fellow beings. Anomic suicides occur when the norms exist,
but have no hold on the individuals who commit suicide because normlessness is
rampant, because of social crises. And the fourth kind of suicide, fatalistic
suicide, occurs because the individual has no solution, no possible avenue for
survival. Clearly, typologies are used only for the purpose of bringing some
clarity and order to reality, which is blurred, fleeting, constantly changing.

The lossfor the
Nation, of S. Anita, the young woman from Tamil Nadu, (Indian Express 2nd
September 2017) who committed suicide, because there was a huge gap between
thesyllabi and training ofDalit students from the State run schools,
andthat provided to more privileged
students from CBSE schools, while entering Medical Colleges,show us how much pressure is put on young
people. In this respect, their lives are ransomed to death, because they take
on the burden of their community upon themselves, and draw attention to the
state of educational hierarchies which areso evident in India. Such young people believe that mobility is the
avenue to freedom, and that with education they can hope to achieve a better
life, while at the same time serving their community. How can we protect these
young scholars? Privatisation of education is not the answer.

The idea of Human Rights is placed in a planetary circumference,
and globalization is the way in which young people initially draw their
vocabulary and their strength. They find, to their horror that the established
system with its hierarchies is larger than their motivations, and the despair
they feel is so total, they take their lives. Durkheim proposed the
institutionalization of guilds (associations) as the best way by which this
call to suicide, could be restrained. “Currents of Suicides” have also been
seenrecently with regard to Blue Whale
Challenge. Durkheim excluded the element of psychologicaldisorders, while explaining rates of suicide,
and presented the concept of social causes, as the predominant aspect of
analyzing suicides. One of the most important films made by a youngcontemporary director, Abhay Kumar, is Placebo. Here, he shows how completely
alienated medical students can feel in their work place, the hospital, and the
sense of constant panic they experience, when the absorption of other people’s
pain, leaves no time for understanding one’s own.

The questions that
Ram Rahim, trickster godman, (in jail, now, for rape of devotees,)poses to society, is essentially the same,
“what or who will integrate the declassed?” By providing a make-believe world,
the opium of the masses, (as Charles Dickens and Karl Marx diagnosed it) he
provided solace to those who whether rich or poor, were already in the clutches
of misery, by drug abuse or by hunger. By manufacturing illusion, through film
andpseudo architecture, he wished these
people to understand that the experienced world, through hallucination and
emotional manipulation, was easier to follow than the real.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

These two, yoga and meditation, are indivisible, since even
those who are secular, enter into deep states of reflection, while engaging in
yoga. The day begins well when one is able to contemplate, and do one’s
exercises simultaneously. The energy that is released is substantial, the mind
is calm, one lets go of all the negativism that might have accumulated because
of the disturbing events all of us are constantly exposed to. Best of all, the
predatory instincts we have, as human beings, constantly engaged in competition
with others, is muted.

Yoga helps to build up immunity, as our nervous systems are
affected very badly by the noise pollution, the contaminated processed food
that we all eat, and the way in which we live our lives, generally without
stoppers. We move, as metropolitan citizens from one excitement to another,
often stopping to merely draw breath,
before we begin another excruciatingly exhausting assignment. The carbon trail
we leave behind is as reminiscent of our own absorption of it, as we stand next
to aeroplane exhausts while disembarking, as frequently as we get stranded next
to a spewing truck or bus or SUV in traffic jams, which last up to ten minutes
at a time. How do we get rid of this carbon which accumulates in our blood,
always making us yawn through the day, as we work endlessly. A good diet helps,
and the free radicals are washed out by our drinking quantities of water and eating well washed salads and fresh
fruit.

Yoga makes us, through its initial emphases on breathing
exercises, spill out the air which is locked in our lungs, and by concentrating
on the breathing, as we pull air in and push it out, it clears our brain. The
concentration that is evident, as we do pranayama is probably the first step to
meditation, since our mind and body becomes integrated in this preliminary
exercise.

The integration of body and mind, which yoga brings to us is
it’s greatest benefit. As we proceed with the exercises that our guru teaches
us, we find them appropriate to our age and physical condition. The guru
selects exercises that are necessary for our well being. Even in a group
setting, where there are people of different ages, it is the guru’s wisdom that
allows us to participate in some, and not in others. If our age and physical
circumstance does not permit us to do some exercises, we should not feel
incompetent. I had an uncle in Kerala, who
did head stands at the age of 90, and he always did his yoga and meditation
before leaving for a twelve hour day at his shop, where he had been a spice
merchant since his early youth. So age, by itself is not a determinant, but for
those of us, who suffer from multiple sclerosis, the paralysis maybe so subtle,
that even the simplest of exercises, such as lifting one’s spine while lying on
the floor, may take some time.

Multiple sclerosis is a neurological illness, which is
neither genetic nor infectious. However, living in polluted cities, eating food
which has been loaded with pesticides does affect one’s chances of developing it.
The similarities with rheumatoid arthritis, and with diabetes is compelling.
Many of the symptoms of MS, which is the slow or rapid loss of faculties, and
the deadness of nerves in the brain and spine may result in blindness, loss of
hearing and ofcourse, paralysis. MS patients live with the dread of these,
waking up in the morning, finding an eye inflamed, or ears blocked, or a body
part stiff, without apparent cause. Yoga and meditation calm the body, and the
mind. Shava Asana, like Pranayama, are excellent for returning the body to its
accustomed tranquil space. For the
galloping form of MS, where loss of limbs is immediate, meditation is calming,
since the body accepts the context in which it has been placed. Most MS
patients, whether it is the slow or rapid form of degradation, know that time
is of the greatest essence, that what they have may well be taken away from
them by the end of the day. They suffer exhaustion, which is almost continuous,
and ofcourse, fear, despair, anxiety. Care givers find their lack of attention
to every day tasks, or their hypersensitivity to these, annoying in turn. They
also suffer from the need to be attended to immediately. Meditation helps in
controlling this need to be understood and attended to, as often, caregivers
are busy with other tasks.

Yoga builds up those muscles which are in danger of atrophy
due to the lack of bloodcirculation in
such patients. Even flexing hands and feet, while in bed, or at the computer,
can go a long way in releasing the blood, where it has jammed or coagulated.
Many times, MS patients wake up, in the middle of the night, with some limb
gone completely dead on them. Ayurvedic treatment is a great boon, and
sometimes, the patient emerges completely free of pain for a couple of months.
The food that helps MS patients most are fruit and salads,cooking in sesame oil. Ofcourse staying clear
of butter, meat, chocolates, cakes, pickles and oily food does help in slowing
the onset of illness. Since heat is the catalyst, those foods which are heating,
trigger off MS episodes, or aggravate existing conditions. The heat rash and
the inflamed eye is the first symptom. If the patient reads the sign that the
body is overheated, and attends to it, then the chances are that she or he will
work to cooling the metabolism down. Some are allergic to dairy products, some
to meat. Each patient has to find out which is the catalyst to the exacerbation
of their condition. Yoga, Ayurveda, Meditation and Diet are the most important
in tailoring the palliative measures useful to controlling the disease, as it’s
tumultuous appearance disturbs everyone equally, without being very visible. MS
patients, before paralysis sets in, look like everyone else, but deep within
they are trying very hard to lead normal lives, and they experience the world
much more dramatically than others. Homeopathy has great remedial doses for
each symptom, as it appears differentially for every patient. It is tailor made
to the person according to the situation in which he or she finds himself or
herself to be in, at any given time. The odd thing about MS is that every week,
the patient finds a new body part is acting up, and standardized allopathic
medicines like cortisone or interferon, are not equally available to all
patients, and come with their own side effects, and are not custom made to the
individual and unique nature of each afflicted person. Yoga, essentially, is a
preventive system of therapy, which handles the pitta (heat) in the person’s
metabolism with it’s ability to understand that our relationship to the cosmos
is constantly being divined by our attitude to it.

Susan Visvanathan, Professor of Sociology, Centre for the
Study of Social Systems, JNU, New Delhi 110067. Email: susanvisvanathan@gmail.com and
susanvisvanathan@hotmail.com

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Sociologists are essentially concerned with the construction
of narratives, whether theoretical or empirical. This aspect of writing
Sociology is dependent on both value neutrality as well as self aware
subjectivities. Clearly, the idea of the charismatic hero evades statistical
Sociology, primarily because the aspect is not of numbers and aggregates, the
generalizing principle or the question of the average. In this context, it is
interesting that fictional histories, whether hagiographies or genealogical
charts are of immense interest to us. When the genealogies appropriate the
cosmos or divinity, as often happens in caste histories, then the clan ancestor
may very well be the sun or the moon. The truth value of these fictional histories
are regarded not in terms of their approximation to reality, but they are
sacred to people. The line between genealogies and sacred histories pertaining
to legends and myths is not very clearly drawn.

When people say that they are the spiritual descendants or
the biological descendants of some personality or the other, they are
essentially communicating how important the legend is to them. Legends have a
historical specificity, a rationale about time as approximate to ours, which
then differentiates it from myths, where sacred histories and geographies are
much more representational. The question of orality or literacy thus becomes
even more specific, since these stories may be passed down by people through
the use of hieroglyphics, writing, oral traditions in verse or song, or through
painting and other art forms. Historythus takes many aspects in this reorientation to the popular. Local
communities may say they emerged from a hole or a tree, but the real intent is
to represent their identity in relation to a particular topography. Their maps
of arrival may be known to them, or to specific individuals, or may have been
forgotten Migration trails thus tell us about forms of co-habitation, as much
as it does about symbols of familiarity with local dialects or languages, food,
and the customs pertaining to the relations between men and women. Sociologists
are familiar with the notion that every one came fromAfrica, until such time as the latest
researches show that Australia is where human beings made the dramatic
evolutionary jump from being tailed and hairy to what we are now, metropolitan
men or women.

The question of extinction is thus not just about art forms,
but also about moral world views. Each society has its particular
preoccupations about what is acceptable, and what is not, and the limits of the
discourse are about rules, who fashions them, and why. If we do not follow the
rules, then indeed we are ostracized. So, why does the accident of history turn
up at odd intervals, and point out contexts of just such inertia,
passivity,possible dread, and the way
in which rule breaking brings out a new framework within which the moral code
is re-read? Does passivity bring about a certain reordering of the world
because the individuals accept the rules without questioning them? Pilgrimage
provides us a way of looking at both migration trails as well as an orientation
to changes in world view. Historical conjunctions place us in the terrible
circumstances of how these are formulated through the work of legends.
Synthesis is both a map of the world as lived, and the unificatory principles
of assimilation. The world view then represents itself through the questions of
the significant other, who draws the myths and legends into a convergence that
becomes acceptable to the masses. The process of this assimilation used to be
byfear of the sword, or in our terms,
the fear of war and death, but it could also be by the domesticating spaces of
love and words. Love in its myriad ways would present itself as if it were the
conclusive argument on how people must follow the path. The debates around
conversion centre around two aspects: statistical conversion which is about
numbers, and may include the exchange of wealth or property, and individual
conversion which is centrally about the transformation of the self. Adi
Sankara, the novella, looks at all these aspects with the gaze that comes from
a severely imposed detachment. The characters are impaled upon each other in
terms of the terrifying possibilities that they represent. The mother may
swallow the son, the crocodile and the snake may equally kill him. The teacher
may protect him from fellow students, but solitude is a better companion. The
loving companion is brushed away, and in homology two cohabiting lovers are
separated. Negotiating the everydayness of divine absorption, Adi composes
verses, where the distinctions between the Gods and Goddesses, and the humans
is rendered osmotic, continually blurring, yet manifesting themselves when so
desired. The line between dream, poetry and revelation is too fine to be
visible. This constant stepping between the worlds is what Adi does in his
philosophical work. He accepts the cosmos in its entirety, and the microscopic
detail which he looks at the world around him becomes the essence of the
fission and fusion that is anticipated as a philosophical process. The map of
the world is in the body, the travels engage with the immediate sacralisation
of the things around him, people and nature. But they remain things, because it
is shunya that beckons most conclusively. What is mapped therefore is biography
as journey, and the establishment of the maths (mutt or institution of religious learning and administration), which are then reintegrated
into sanatan dharma as points of significance. They too, as pilgrims, make the journey
and see the world Adi saw, they too worship at the shrines where he made his
presence known. The map of pilgrimage thus becomes the map of the self, and the
possibility of death is never far away, as the ability to make these journeys
is imposed on those who have the means to travel these vast distances, be they
renouncers or householders. For those who cannot, the verses and the tantric
images are sufficient to create the cosmos within the home.

The second novel Beyond the Ferry looks at the mundane
aspects of existence, knowing very well that marriage can be the most dangerous
of contracts. It uses the stereotype of a young woman married to an elderly
man, then places the urbane manner in which exploitation regularly occurs
within the household, and the possibilities of an illicit romance upsetting
the apple cart. The young man as intruder who sets to stalk the woman,
disturbing her self imposed incarceration within the household, is a trope, which novelists use often, probably because it exists in reality. The intruder is
known in the protagonist’s youth, and while she hides her true feelings for
him, which is fear and suspicion, the instinct to love is present as a memory
that pervades her. The friend of a friend, he becomes in essence the one who
carries the hidden language of adolescence, and mutual contempt turns to
friendship. Here, too, the map is of the body, in its various aspects of
recovering the self, the individuals never remain constant, there is a
bleakness about the known world, and yet there are images of hope and possible
recovery. The fact that Christians and Muslims may not marry is underlined by
the fact that the childhood love that the protagonist seeks to forget is ever
present. The young man’sexistence,
within the boundaries of his own Christian community is underlined by a
reflexive longing, and a practical denial. The novella questions what is love,
and doubts it. However, the optimism which arrives from hope is a constant
theme. It does not look towards revenge, but to redressal. It presumes that for
the protagonists, the future looks towards the practical realities of their
conditioning, to the questions woven by society for its own regeneration. Is
there a gargantuan appetite that Society has for its rules, and do people
conform to them? When they don’t, we have cause for a novella.

In this work too, I attempt to understand why the maps of
our country are made flexible by cultural crossing over. Essentially, we are in
the warped space of denying these, the questions of migration trails which are
entered into by consent, and which lead to the further domestication of
impulses and primordial loyalties to caste and clan. Do Muslims have a caste,
and how do they overcome these principles of friendly contempt and familiarity, to enter into dialogue? Is the employee and employer status forged in terms of
a pretence of fealty? Is hierarchy ever present in how these fealties
become feral, or are in turn conceded to? What is the language of adaptation?
The novelist asks these questions primarily because they are ever present. The
consent to slavery has been a compulsory theme in my work, only because as a St
Thomas Christian by birth, I carry the weight of my forbears, who were often
referred to as Thamburan or Thamburatti, only because they owned land several
generations ago. Their poverty in a rural landscape was profoundly disguised by
their ancestral claim to two thousand years of hegemonic authority over local communities.
In these clan biographies, it is necessary to communicate how well versed we
are in scriptures, how loyal to the Church, how our adima or slaves, remained ever loyal to us, in ties of love and
bondage. Further, we communicated in lineage histories, that we did not need
to engage into enquiries about our ancestors, as occasionally we would find biographies
that contested the descent from Brahmin ancestors. Nelycinda reoriented the map to older histories, of both voyage and
interculturality, asking serious questions about why voyages for trade or
religion would affect the way in which people thought about the world in which
they lived. They did not have to be charismatic, to be attributed a biography,
fiction gave these probable histories, as Natalie Zemon Davis called it, a
provenance of it own. Thus, the metalanguage of fiction provided us illustrations
of the past and present as ever contiguous. We believe that they co-exist for
that is the nature of the human mind. The abstract drawings of cave dwellers,
and tribal communities in the post modern globalized world, seek to dwell in
just this contemporaneity. Much of the early twentieth century fiction in
Europe sought to draw on this primevalism, which they called "primitivism" to
engage with the profundities of what Claude Levi Strauss called the Unity of the Human
Mind. In our search for this contiguity between ourselves and those who live in
the Third World, a euphemism for the drudgery and dirt in whicheighty percent of our population continues to
live, we chance upon extinction as the solution to their distress.This enforced extinction is placed on the
canvas of expectations of our 70 year old democracy as the "costs of
development". Do Suleiman ( a former road worker) and Shazia ( a middle class
trader’s daughter in a hypergamous marriage) share in the tribulations of being
poor by choice, not destiny? When they jump the ship of their wealthy
employers, one from the contract of marriage, the other from the contract of
apprenticeship, do they consent to the irregularity of their decision, as they
share a meal of sardines sitting on a stone bench at the railway station?

For these urbanites, the map of their city, Benaras, is
fathomed only by the anchorage of known places, and the continuous congestion
of the roads which they travel by autorickshaw, owned by the elderly trader,
and driven by the young educated employee. The task of education is to provide
survival skills, and to this generation, no obstacles are perceivable, as they
proceed with the task of pushing forward. They have to survive, that is the
minimum that is required of them as partners. Will their families of
orientation receive them with affection and understanding? The novella works
with the limited scope of leaving the future empty of intention. Are these
people real, do they have a future…every audience of readers asks this
question.

By engaging with the commonplace, I also deal with the
problem of how Muslims in India define their world, while negotiating past the
stereotype we find in North India, which is terrorist equal to Muslim. This is
one of the most painful formulae that self conscious Indian Citizens, who may
not describe themselves as Hindu Nationalists face. This denial of martiality,
which is after all a cultural custom, among fundamentalist religious groups,
regardless of their nomenclature is demeaning to the housewife, who is trying
to get through the day with the minimum of conflict. Language becomes the
space, where he or she defines the necessity of civility, while domestic abuse
comes veiled in many aspects as affection and guile. Shazia’s name is changed
to Tazia by her mother in law, and her persona changed from free spirit, rowdy
and fun loving to the docile housewife, who secretly reads forbidden love
stories. Feminism as deciphering the script of the legitimating aspect of
docility as servility is the characteristic tool that I use. Killing the angel
in the house, as Virginia Woolf described it, is only one way the novelist
describes how literature uses the negative example, as a means by which the
protagonist finds freedom. There is no angel, there is only competent housework
done equally by men or women, and servitude is not an aspect of this grammar.
How, then, to look at the trope of the dominating mother?

All three novels engage with this, dealing with the coinage
of the suppression of sexuality, either Oedipal or factual. Where this
sexuality is liberated, we find a woman like Shazia’s mother, who is indeed
caught in her household duties, but prioritises her relationship to her
husband, through the convenience of agreeing with him that the stability of the
household depends on the marriage of their children.The harm that she does to Shazia is not
apparent to her, content in her own traditions and security, and their weekly
conversations are a balm to the mother, because surely all must be well with
the daughter even in another naad (country) if she is well fed and well
clothed. The marriage of convenience then benefits the mother of Shazia because
the reputation of a wealthy trader is bigger than the questions of his age and
his preoccupations, which are aesthetic. Don’t ask too many questions, and
cover up for seeming lacunae in the cat’s cradle is the general norm of the
secure housewife.

The third novella The Palace Complex attends to the problem
of pilgrimage as a site of constant hope, ending in an anticipated tragedy. The
protagonists are caught both within the web of their own relationships, where
war is the unseen bedfellow, and illness a constant companion. The map of the
universe is defined in terms of how individuals know where they live, and where
they come from, and how transitory is the passage as they make these crossings
by sea and land, as they go from place to place. Kinsmen and women, soldiers, and families. all of them are scattered across a vast map. They live by their
dreams and hopes, just as we do even today. They define the warped nature of
their emotions in terms of their resistance to the stylized way in which others
wish them to behave. The urbanite in medievalism is caught within a vast
hinterland of social expectations, and the final resolution lies in their
ability to mourn what they no longer have… the possibility of stability.

In History and Truth, (1965) Paul Ricoeur describes History as development, involving decisions, crises and
growth. Thus, objectivity becomes an ethical premise. The Philosopher.
according to Ricoeur, looks to the ‘advent of man’ in the flux of history. This
preoccupation with biography is concerned also with events as they occur and
the selection of these by the subjectivity of the historian in the writing of a
narrative. There has to be a theoretical frameworkwhich marks out the way in which the view of the world is defined, and how narrative
composes it.The essential premise is, then, that of the same and the
other: how can we describe the institutions of the past in terms of the
present? The historian’s choiceimplies
looking for something. We must be motivated in looking for something, or we
will find nothing. So, history is a kind of composition. Historians are looking
for attitudes, human attitudes. Philosophers turn these attitudes into
categories. This is the difference between event and advent. Ricoeur writes,

“Our initial dilemma between varying history and the idea of
immutable truth henceforth takes on a more subtle form: a neutral sympathy
becomes attached to history; engagement and the risk of being mistaken becomes
associated with the search for truth.” ( Ricoeur 1965:30)

The contrast between the closure of history is the openness
of being. Alongside, or rather mediating this, is the axes of communication.
Communication is the structure of true knowledge. This praxis of knowledge is
dialogic. All truth must enter into an inter subjective arena, there must be
the communication of ideas and interests, and combat is essential in the
explaining of oneself.

We must connect this to Max Weber, and the quest for the
historical actor, where causality and consequence are integral to sociological
explanation. What is the role of the catalyst? How do we understand
charisma?Can we locate our quest for
sociological analyses in terms of that which cannot be analysed?

Ricoeur defines our problem set as Theology vs History and
Eschatology vs Events.Following the
aspect of Tradition as 'Truth as an Agreement', he suggests that there has
firstly to be an agreement of judgement as affirmation, or negation. Do we
agree with Tradition? Is there a conclusive relationship between speech and
reality? Is there an agreement among ourselves? There are, according to him,
truths which are visible, truths which are about dispositions. Some truths
appear inseparable from the process of verification, from possibilities of
instrumentation, from the particular methodology of a given science. This is
different from experimental truth, which includes the very basis of the
anticipation of exclusion of all that which is known, and which springs from
the conviction of community. The historical novel plays with these
possibilities that these subjectivities, so strong, so palpable are ever
present.

Ricoeur is interested in the triangular relationship that
exists as a dialectic between perception, knowledge and action. The perceived,
with its world horizon, encompasses knowledge and action as the vastest theatre
of our existence. Laboratories, the applications of science to work, well
being, and war, give a perceived presence to science, which is thus woven into
our life and death. ( Ricoeur 1965:169) The botanic presence of death, or its entropic
manifestation is now returned to us as the formulae of the industry of war and
it’s constant manipulation of our psyche. We return to legends to fulfill our
sense of prophecy as an integral part of tradition.

Ricoeur confirms in History
and Truth (1965) that it is the dialectic that brings institutions into fruition.
A value is recognised only by serving it. The universal is the historical. The
statistical value of the universal is to be located. Art is also anchored in
truth. Art must have coherence. It may not be imitative. It must communicate
authenticity to the receiver, the complete presence in the mind of the receiver
and creator which dominates and convinces. Yet, this truth of submission is also
a truth of doubt and questioning.

The true artist, for Ricoeur, only experiences the motivation which is
proper to his/her art and does not yield to any commands, exterior to his or her art. He/She does not popularize the Revolution or submit to the tyrant. Art does not
plagiarise from a given social science, but draws from its sensitivity. It is a
rupture. Others follow the artist, as he or she reveals, where the Scientist
shrouds. By creating figures and myths, the artist interprets the world, and
establishes a permanent ethical judgement on our existence, even if he/she does not
moralise, and specially if he does not moralise. Poetry is a criticism of life.
All the orders of truth are mutually contested and reinstated in an endless
order ( Ricoeur 1965:174)

Raziaudding Aquil and Partha Chatterjee in History in the Vernacular (2008) collate the
works of several authors, each contributing to our understanding of why the
linear Collingwoodian notion of time and history are still evident in the
teaching of syllabus, but why genealogies, family histories, biographies, and
re-reading of charismatic heroes will embellish how we think of the past.
Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subramanium argue for the presence of
traditional texts called the niti texts. These are essentially directed to the
lay reader so that he/she may know the customs and conventions, the political
etiquette that are present in any place. It also presumes that people read the
legends, or hear them, that they have access to a corpus of learning which are
traditionally defined as essential for reading.

The construction of
historical narratives thus locates the way in which ideologies are represented
as totalizing spaces. These provide legends and myths with ways by which their
endorsement may be continuous as providing security to those who benefit from
their claim to legitimation. The sensibilities of communities and individuals
are honed by their absorption of these myths, the

call to power and the verification of allegiance is all
something we are aware of. Can a poet write about Magadalene if he/she comes
from another faith, can a novelist write about Adi Sankara, if not a Hindu? The
legitimation of narrative as sacred history in Mircea Eliade’s sense of the
term is something which we need to go back to. This double bind of being
objective value neutral students of the Humanities or Social Sciences has
become problematized by our manifest desire to vehemently espouse citizenship
rights, or defend them for those who have no access to the signature so
conclusivelyrepresentative of freedom.
The right to selfhood is marked entirely by self consciousness that enables
free thought, and free speech. Let us be clear that if this is denied to us,
then there can be no literature.

This obligation to be free is typical of the 21st
century. Atleast, one should have the self awareness that decries subjugation,
or the varieties of colonialism that constantly reappear. Migration histories
today define how the world is evolving, through war and deprivation. Fifty percent
of migrations aretoday sea based
migrations, and they are of people fleeing from war. Migration for work, as was
characterized by the 20th century is now replaced by terrible
circumstances of defining what it means to be human in the most terrible terms.
As Malthusianism represents itself, it calls upon humans to define on a day to
day bases, how they will view the accidents of history. With global warming,
the statistics of death through suicides or starvation are posed as the new
symbols of extinction. We know that those who survive will do so because the
rampant aspect of annihilation in rapid industrialization is technologically
given. Food becomes the symbol of excess, but with it, the chemicals that
accompany processing and preserving food are essentially visible. Each
civilization attempts to understand seasons and compatible forms of occupation
as given to it in terms of its familiarities with itslogic. With climate change, that vocabulary
is destroyed. When should the farmer plant, when sow, when reap?

The novelist is essentiallyconcerned with how the world begins to change with each catastrophe, and
offers new insights into how this world will be viewed. The different epochs of
time give us a frame from which we can compare our different locations.

Adi understands the cold winters of the Himalayas as a time
of both meditation as well as the utmost challenges placed upon his
physicality. The anticipation of death is ever present, he fears only that the
oscillation between the here and now, and the images of the past will reduce
him to a corporeality which cannot be depended upon. The body is freed from
these obligations, and the mendicant withdraws into himself, assured that he
will be returned whole, or atleast in pristine condition to his waiting
audience. Hundreds of years have passed since he walked from place to place,
and yet, to those who follow his pilgrimage, the contexts of language and moral
codes, stigmatization and exclusion, life and death, unassuaged longing and its
converse, fruition and opportunities, are still immediately visible.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Adityanath ruled Gorakhpur, like a robber baron, being voted
into Parliament several times by his unruly mob of RSS platoons, recreating
with ardor his sense ofmale chauvinism.
Gorakhpur is the site of a pristine temple, its white neat structure, nestling
in a grove of trees. People come from all over UP to worship, and taxi drivers
describe the kanphatta(a sect of yogis)
monk as having a large diamond in his ear.The excessively large glittering diamond in his pierced ear says it all.
The rurallumpen proletariat is in awe
of him. They describe him as having authority over scriptures, holding classes
for them every day, and generally providing samosas and tea as part of their
everyday sustenance as they work hard to fulfill the criteria of being foot
soldiers for him. Gorakhpur represents Saivite splendor, martial Hinduism, in
which the Gita printing press and the town itself become the manner in which a
millennial old renuncianttradition of
gathering itself intocontinual
martiality is represented.

Gorakhpur has fieldswhich are rich with rice and sugarcane, the markets brim over with
vegetables, and the people are representative of Indian villages, where
subsistence farming allows them to survive. However, education and health
benefits are what the State provides, andgiven aroutine lack of attention
to them, the hospital tragedy where infants died of encephalitis is seen as a
“normal” aspect of life in the monsoon. BEMARU states represent that borders
are infact osmotic, and the people catch overcrowded trains to various parts or
Bihar, Maharashta, Rajasthan and Uttara Pradesh, to become a floating population
of labourers who provide India with it’s resilient work force. Nepal lies very
close, and the king of Nepal often visited Gorakhpur in the past. Cows and
bulls eating plastic infilthy garbage
dumps is a very typical scene in Gorakhpur.

Kushinagar, fifty three kms from Gorakhpur, is in the
excellent hands of the Patna Archaeological Circle. The immense statue of the
Buddha in eternal sleep(parinirvana)is
the site that pilgrims from Japan, Sri Lanka and Thailand visit. Guest houses
have been built for them, as they are well paying tourists, who have come to
see the gilded Buddha who sleeps in the company of mourners, most of whom are
Dalits from the town, simple people, without mobiles or movie cameras. The
Gupta rulers left us a monumental legacy in this small hinterland town,
companion to the larger untidy, crowded, eternally noisy Gorakhpur. Here, there
is a silence, large empty roads, and beautiful lawns aound the memorial to
Buddha’s cremation. Kushinagar is emblazoned by Maurya stone and brick work,
the austere compounds and relics sufficient to remind us of the Buddha’s
constant presence in architecture that commemorates his life and teaching. The
anguish of the Dalits as they mourn his death is so palpable in Kushinagar,
becauselocal legend has it that he
shared their food, and died because what they ate was habitually rotten stale
food. If there is an intensity of suffering it is there, in the room, where
theimmense image of thedying Buddha lies in deep sleep, coated in
goldmetal.

Mediating these two towns, Gorakhpur and Kushinagar, are
woods, where Buddhiyamaholds sway over
pilgrims. They believe in her ability to save them from drowning by water. She
is as integral to our understanding of small towns as the legends which inform
them are matters of everyday practice. In these towns with agrarian hinterlands,
and many stagnant pools, children often drown to death. Buddhiyamais not a footnote to Saivite authority, she
is the divinity that protects the householder. In the woods, in a temple built
to her, she is visited and beseeched to. She provides the fulfillment that
householders seek in the virtue of their ordinary lives. She does drown some,
though, according to legends and fear compounds pilgrimage. The Gods do as they
will, and human beings respond, sometimes by fearing them, and sometimes
forgetting them.

The poor who visit Buddhi Ma bring their families to this
site so that they may eat and drink festival foods, buy clothes and toys, have
their hands henna patterned, balloons and amulets purchased. Since Indians
believe in karma, it’s a little frightening, when we see politicians behave as
they do, uncaring of thepoor and the
disabled. It’s essential that we return to the secular frame of our
constitution and demand human rights as the basic platform for our negotiations
across party lines, or religious faiths. We must invest in our children the
right to freedom of expression, and the possibilities of religious variation.
Masculinist theologies, whether secular or religious tend to see power and
domination as the curricula of post modernity. But it is the hidden away, the
unspoken, the secreted, that appears as a contrast.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Certain parts of
India are occasionally subject to the
circulation of rumours. These are often vindictive and violent,
resulting in death or mutilation. Either through the use of emotional
manipulation
or extreme forms of aggression, a vulnerable group is targeted. These
may be the elderly, women, uneducated, young people, the extremely poor,
or the wealthy.

Quite
often, the cry of witchcraft as an accusation accompanies the rumours.
Where women are widowed, or in their later years, powerful because they
own property, or control their sons,
in economic decisions, they become targeted. The accusation of
that they bring bad luck is often made, and such women are
turned out of their homes. In a mimicry of feudal situations, where ever
tradition has begun to hold a very strong claim to legitimacy, men and
women are drawn into a strange and surreal space,
often not of their own making, where mutual violence finds release.

Women,
too, co-operate in the Malthusian aim of bringing down their own
numbers, because breeding of girl children is thought to bring hunger,
poverty and shame to the family. The girl child whether in Tamil Nadu
or in Haryana is thought to be an aspect of excess, so she maybe killed
in the womb, or as soon as she is born, or given less food, or
opportunities for education if the parents see her
birth as a curse. These relic customs are a sign of demographic
responses to situations of hunger and deprivation. When huge numbers of
girl children had been killed off in
the womb, in Haryana and Punjab, manifesting the lust for male offspring, the brides had to be imported from Bihar
and Bengal in the 70s, and from Kerala in the early decades of the 21st century. Superstition, fanned by watching tv, and media hype, continues to hold sway in these regions.

The circulation of rumour about the cutting of hair of women in Delhi (zee news 3rd
August 2017) has had such an impact that an old woman of sixty years
got killed because
her accidental entry into someone else’s house had the young men
suspicious that she was there to cut off the tresses of someone in their
household. Nobody knows where these events are orchestrated from, and
by whom.

Old
women being targeted is a sure sign that someone in the society sees
them as useless eaters. In fascism, the need to constantly assert
oneself as being within the group of the efficient
and the functionally useful if not notable is
seen to be necessary. The army of men and women who offer
themselves as soldiers of the state demanding purity of blood, and
tradition as their legitimating talisman become absorbed in
activities rousing needless violence that gives them a
sense of euphoria and power. Enclaves of violence begin to knit together
to give the appearance that it is the moral right of this self
proclaimed army to kick its
opponents, or those they do not think fit to live. Such people do not
have a theology specifically, they use a representative text to claim
that jihad is righteous, or Manu’s teachings are legal. In the modern
nation state, which operates with a historical
mandate towards citizenship, the abuses of justice by the valorization
of traditional laws became more than visible. The political endorsement
of murder and rape, and lynching of those whom communalists
consider to be different is terrifying. The threats and rumours that
they pass around become even more ugly when they say that they are in
power, it is their party, it is their state, and what
they say goes.

The
greed for money acts as a catalyst to define how people will behave
towards one another in this cleavage of social worlds. There are laws
which define in tradition how each category should behave or should be
treated. The absorption in
ritual and to priestly access has made many
lower caste communities side with the upper caste
fundamentalist groups. The actual caste lines and norms do not change,
as marriage, food sharing and occupation are still defined by
traditional rules. As lower castes
become more wealthy and powerful, it is possible that they will
dominate the political sphere. Sanjay Subramanium, Velcheru Narayana
Rao and David Shulman have shown us in
Symbols of Substance (1992) that the reign of the Nayaka kings
in early medievalism extending right upto the coming of European
colonialists, provided for the rapture of theatre, poetry, food, grand
ceremonies and
other forms of conspicuous consumption. Tradition then
provides a royal panapoly of excess as power is incubated through
success at war.
Nayaka rule in medievalism is the test case that upper castes had
to bow down to the lower castes, if the latter were kings. although
Shudra.

Monday, July 3, 2017

While multinationals have stabilised in
India, and recruitment portals are replete with the statistics of employment,
we have to look at the various spaces people occupy mentally, while serving the
nation.

Ideologies tincture our worlds. We presume
that right wing ideologies are totalitarian, but then, so were left wing ones.
And those who were fence sitters, representing the right to remain neutral,
were generally vacuous. When India won it’s Freedom, from the British, the
Gandhi Nehru leadership had it’s moments of extreme tension, since mutual
dialogue was not always possible. Industrialisation and Nehru’s “new temples of
India”, have always communicatedthat
the Nation knows best. As a result rural people are always buttressed between
the world they have known, and the rights to tradition, which they hold so
sacred, and the sensibilities of the elite, who mark them as backward, ignorant
and superstitious. Worse, they often play on these sentiments in a bid to bring
them to their side of the fence.

A former Naxalfrom St Stephen’s College, once said that
they had to leave the villages because the villagers could no longer feed
them.The daughter of a famousBJP politician said that actually they were
like everyone else, but for reasons of political gain, they played the Hindutva
card. “Like everyone else” in the late seventies, when the Jan Sangh flags were
beginning to flutter in places like Ashram and Lajpat Nagar, in New Delhi,
meant “modern, anglophile and looking towards America as the site of popular
cultural consumption.”

It is not surprising,then, that forms of socialisation make us
perceive agriculture as something that industrialisation should promote,
trampling the interests of the farmer with small holdings, underground. That
two and half acres is the national average for producing bumber crops is
something Indians should beproud of.
However,that industrial elites look to
colonising everything is a self evident fact. The joint stock companies, sociologists
argued in the1960s, created a buffer
between bourgeoisie and proletariat. That was when the factory was the mode of
organising, and joint investments integrated a rising middle class into the
profits to be made by investing in companies. Today, however, as the
Sociologist Daniel Bell foresaw, it is the laboratory that predominates, and
since secrecy and surveillance are its bywords, the oligarchy of scientists
excludes the common masses from decision making, and ‘fear and trembling’ are
the natural consequences.

Socialism, co-operatives, unions all become
redundant in these new economies. Political organisation in these new States
disclose that federation is irrelevant when it comes to the colonisation of
rivers, mountains, fertile lands, deserts, even the sea. The commons are
considered to be the right of exploitation by contract to private parties, for
enhancement of industrial goals. Tribals and peasants are rendered even more
marginal. Craft communities are deprived of their natural skills, as their
poverty forces them into manual labour for construction.Since they are dehumanised, they are merely
paid minimum wages and left to their skills as a lumpen proletariat to survive
in the midst of real problems such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, and
decrepitude in old age. Caste comes in as a useful explanation for their
condition, as everything is blamed on their previous life. Consensus about
religious participation between upper castes and lower castes leads to euphoric
states during ritual events. Merchants and workers combine to engage in
participation where the presence of Gods and Goddesses further elaborates this
forced servitude upon thelower castes.
The depletion in the numbers of theworking class members enrolled in Unions is only too apparent.

Socialism by itself, without it’s self
regulating mechanisms leads to tremendous inefficiency. Theindustrial barons, as debtors to
Nationalised Banks, clearly represent the way in which the bourgeoisie are able
to thwart the codes of modern banking and send the entire nation into paroxysms
as we saw in the winter of 2016. Earlier recessions had not disturbed the
Indian economy because of the resilience of post box economies which nestled in
the Post Office, and ofcourse keeping money under the bed, and in cupboard by
housewives who always managed to stow away savings for a rainy day.The mountains of cash which surfaced are
still to be recycled, after being shredded, to make notebooks for government
school children.

The second example of Socialism without
legitimation is ofcourse Air India.There is a category known as tickets for
LTC, which charges more than the sum routinely charged by Airlines companies
for air tickets, by several thousands. If the government employees do not book
through a company called Laurie and Balmer (some relic mnemonic from the past)
the tickets are not refunded by the government. So this is a form of
corruption, as the government siphons money from one account to uphold another.